God & Country--Produced by Rob and Michele Reiner and directed by Dan Partland, this documentary about Christian Nationalism in American politics is impassioned but lucid and not hysterical. Based on Katharine Stewart's book The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, the movie is presented as a warning to secular or non-evangelical citizens for whom the propaganda and political agenda of that movement may be largely invisible.
The talking heads here are mostly Christians themselves, ranging from Russell Moore to Reza Aslan to Jemar Tisby to Kristin Kobes du Mez to Sister Simone Campbell to Bishop William J. Barber II to Veggie Tales co-creator Phil Vischer. They speak calmly, even a little sheepishly, but firmly and with an indisputable insider's perspective, and their message is: Christian Nationalism isn't about religious practice; it's about amassing political power.
It's not exactly breaking news when we're informed that Christian Nationalists are terrified of and enraged by feminism, LGBTQ rights, secular education, uncensored libraries and abortion rights, or that the movement is historically connected to racism and segregation. But too many people may not grasp the degree to which Christian Nationalism's ultimate aim is a non-democratic, Christian-supremacist America, and the startling degree to which it's making progress.
In support of this, Partland shows us copious clips of wild-eyed rants by Evangelical heavy hitters stating these aims in no uncertain terms. A comedic highlight comes when, in the midst of one of the movie's many montages of preachers bleating and screeching, we see Robert Jeffress say, with a straight face, "We cannot be silent any longer!"
Partland also works to debunk some of Christian Nationalism's favorite falsehoods, notably that America was intended by the Founders as a "Christian Nation" or that the Separation of Church and State is not found in the Constitution. Attorney and author Andrew Seidel observes here that true religious freedom is impossible without Separation of Church and State.
By way of emphasizing its urgency, the movie also notes that Christian Nationalists were central agents of the January 6 Insurrection, despite the irony of President 45 as the object of their veneration. "When I was a young Evangelical minister," notes Faith and Action founder Rob Schenck, "we used Donald Trump as a sermon illustration for everything a Christian should not be."
God & Country shares a twofold difficulty with many other worthy progressive political documentaries. First, though well-organized and smoothly edited, it's full of unavoidable footage of the likes of Ralph Reed, Jerry Falwell, Paul Weyrich, Greg Locke, Pat Robertson, Jim Bakker, Kenneth Copeland and Paula White, not to mention 45 himself, that can be painful for many of us to watch no matter how necessary. Secondly, many of the people who most need to see this movie probably won't watch it. To employ a more than usually apt cliché, it's preaching to the choir.
No comments:
Post a Comment